Fruits of Zanzibar

(By Calvin) In Zanzibar, we have a lot of fruits that you get in America, like bananas, watermelons, and pineapples.  But there are some fruits that they have in Zanzibar but not in America regularly: mangoes, bungos, passion fruits, custard apples, breadfruits, rambutans, and mangosteens.

My favorite is passion fruit because they’re soooo sour. You eat passion fruits by cutting them in half, taking a spoon, putting them in your mouth and sucking the fruity bits off, and either spitting the seeds out or crunching them up, or—as I like to do—eating it like yogurt and swallowing the seeds.  I also like passion fruit in juice, mixed with bungo, or watermelon, or plain.  My favorite way is making the juice plain and then mixing it with soda water.

Bungo is a lot like passion fruit except with bigger seeds.  Like passion fruit, you wait to eat it until it looks all rotten on the outside.  With passion fruit, it’s ripe when it looks wrinkly and rotten, and with bungo it looks moldy.  

To eat rambutans and mango-
steens, you cut all the way around the skin at the middle, but you don’t cut into the fruit.  Then you pull off the skin and then put the fruit in your mouth and spit out the seed after you chew off the fruit like you do with a cherry.  Once I ate 16 rambutans!  Rambutan skins look sort of like sea urchins, and if you cut the skin right you can put it on your nose like a clown's nose.  Unfortunately, they’re out of season now. 

Breadfruits were originally brought here from other countries because they’re incredibly easy to grow.  When there were slaves here, the slaveowners gave the slaves breadfruit instead of other foods because the slaves could work full time and not spend so much time growing other foods.  They don’t taste like fruits, but more like potatoes that grow on trees. You have to cook them and take the “bone” out of the middle and rinse the latex out. I like them turned into big French fries.

   

I’ll miss the fruits here when I go back to America, especially passion fruit and rambutans, which you can’t get in America.  But I’m happy we’ll be able to get apples, cherries, strawberries, and many other kinds of berries!